Angry Like A Child

It comes on warm and strong.

Rising up from the toes
it boils in the belly
blooming
into a firmament of fierceness.

It's a punch-a-hole-in-the-sky 

                                                        feeling.

It's a throw-the-coffee-cup-against-the-wall 

                                                                      feeling.

It's a everything-is-wrong-and-I-have-been-cheated
                                                                                     feeling.

It's a scream-in-the-middle-of-the-woods-so-nobody-can-hear
                                                                                                 feeling.

And it's a scream-in-the-middle-of-the-subway-car-so-everyone-can-hear
                                                                                                                feeling.

Its the feeling that I should have been loved better.

That my child should have been born.

Its a feeling that my hands should have been held

and not clenched into fists.

It's a feeling of having crossed
too many streets
alone. 

Sharon Venezio

Poem of Undoing

How many kinds of undoing are there?

The word love in the back of my throat,

mouth ajar, as I don't say your name.

Is unhappiness a kind of undoing?

The heart's fault line, a fracture

in the space between two bodies.

My heart is a thirsty artichoke,

each petal a different version of undoing.

If I knock three times, will you reappear?

Ellen Goldburg

No One Knows How Far

the breath goes, though surely nothing stops the air
we breathe out.  It must blend in with all the air there is.
How could it leave? Where would it go? No--

even the last breath doesn’t die.  It keeps
pinballing its nosy molecules off others,
bopping along, so we’re breathing someone’s  

discarded breath, breath of Icelandic poppy leaf,
of feral cat, of a woman who screamed in Indonesia
and a batterer who finally sobbed.  I like to think   

of breaths carried on the wind falling for each other
like on a cruise for singles who nudge shoulders with strangers
as they crowd the rail when a humpback blows  

then shout in unison when she and her black
mirror-backed calf breech.  I like to think of each breath
that each of us, dead and alive, exhales from birth

bouncing its way around the globe and coming, generations
later, out of other people’s mouths as opera arias and
Viva La Huelga! and I miss you—don’t go.

Fall Feelings

I'm going out to the woods for a while
out into the solitary sound
of autumn-under-foot.

Going down deep for a time
to remember what the womb was like.

Until the silent snow falls.
Until the quiet snow is done falling.

Olive the Dog

Upright and altert.

One swift nose twitch in each cardinal direction.
Compass of olfaction.

Ears as pitched tents
on either side
of the fluffy
and deceivingly friendly
face of a huntress.

Olive the dog.
Predator of morning songbirds
and plump chipmunks.